ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Anne Sexton’s negotiation of academic contexts informed her self-fashioning as a poet. Sexton’s teaching notes for her “Anne on Anne” course on her own poetry at Colgate University in 1972 record the close reading strategies that resulted from her autodidactic career. The peculiarity of this course enabled Sexton’s redefinition of the roles of poet, teacher, critic, and student. Her teaching notes respond to and reshape close reading strategies that midcentury critics had defined in relation to modernist texts. As a poet and teacher, she not only created new materials but also altered the interpretation of them.
